Practical market gardening information and resources

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I love gardening! And I love making money at it! I think there has never been a better time to start gardening for money. Whether you have 25 acres, or 5 acres or even less than 1 acre, it's possible to create a successful market garden business.

These days gardeners have access to tools and information and resources that can absolutely transform the 'traditional' business of market gardening. At the same time, demand for fresh, naturally-grown food is soaring. Cool!

I’ve seen some great books about market gardening and gardening in general; the ones I recommend are the ones I believe got it right (see my comments on that topic a little further down).

I sometimes feel a lot of the writing about gardening for a living is bound by conventional thinking and outdated ideas.

There are new ideas, tools, and techniques out there that (in my humble opinion) change the equation a lot with respect to making money from your garden.

This 'old-fashioned' view is characterized by phrases like ‘small scale’, ‘low volume production’, and ‘labour intensive'.

While it is true that market gardening will always be work, there are ways to work smarter; many ‘new generation’ market gardeners are using them to create levels of production (and income)only dreamed of on ‘conventional’ farms.

What else ya got for me?

Getting started in market gardening

If you are just getting started, there are many questions you should answer before throwing some seed in the ground:

• How much money can I make (or do I need to make) from my garden?
• Who are my customers and how do I find them?
• How can I finance the start-up of my business if I don’t have a lot of money?
• What do I need to start up my garden?
• How much land do I need?

There is a structured process to follow in answering these questions. Every successful business (include market gardeners) should follow a certain set of steps in the right order to get these answers. The steps are:

• Planning
• Marketing
• Management
• Production

Determining your income needs and setting targets for sales is called planning. Every successful business starts their business cycle with this step.

So set some targets for sales and income, estimate your expenses, and make sure you can actually make a profit. By the way this is one of the major strengths of the Community Supported Agriculture model; you can set targets, recruit customers, and know exactly how much income you will receive, in advance!

Once you’ve set a sales target, you need to go out and find enough sales (i.e. customers) to meet them. Figuring out who your customers are and then finding them is called marketing.

This does not have to be complicated! You just need to get the word out about your business to the appropriate ‘pool’ of potential customers. If you do this right, customers will come to you.

When customers respond, you then need to put the management practices in place to make sure you can meet their needs.

Finally, after all this comes production. This involves planning your garden - i.e. figuring out how much to grow, when to start plants, when crops will be available for sale, how much land will you need – and then working the plan to reliably produce a saleable crop.

Next: What exactly is Bootstrap Market Gardening?. This is the intro to our award winning model for starting-up, marketing and managing a successful small farm business more . . .

Plan your farm business. Plan before your plant! Find out how to set targets for sales and establish a price for your produce to ensure you make a profit more . . . page.

Marketing your farm business: part 1. Once you have set sales targets and planned expenses, you need to find customers. Our approach to marketing as let us build a successful small farm business more . . .

Marketing your farm business: part 2 - Finding MORE customers. Once you have tapped you warm market, you will probably need to find a few more likely prospects to meet your targets. New Terra farm has used these methods to build two businesses more . . .


Marketing your farm business: part 3 - Closing the Sale. After you mail out your flyer and the phone starts to ring, then what? How do you respond to your prospective customers to turn them into actual customers? Be ready to respond to customer questions more . . .